Travel funnies 2013 (4)

Torrey Orton

June 24, 2013

“Amber waves of grain…”

I grew up with this line incised in memory through a thousand singings of America the beautiful in primary school I imagine (because I can’t really remember) and finally in an unlikely place and time I saw amber grain waving in central France a few weeks ago!! And I’ve looked at a lot of grain in Australia in the last 40 years!! The waving grain struck me in two different settings: one, upland farmlets in the Parc Mercantour and, two, much larger broad acre plantings along the TGV pathway in Burgundy between Beaune and Lyon. I think the revelation of this obvious experience has escaped me in Oz all these years because the grain growing season is winter when we almost never go to grain growing areas and the grain grown in our neck of Oz is thinner on the ground per hectare than the dense covering of early summer French grain growth. It really did wave and look like waves as it did so…high enough to have peaks and troughs but not to break. There were no green or amber horses to be seen.

Seen, and then again…

We went out for a bite on our first night in Montpellier to a central city area called La Comedie after the opera house which heads up one end of the Place which is the main public open space of the central city, fed by a tram line populated with recognisable versions of our imported trams in Melbourne, save for the better paint work, cleanliness (nil tagging) and overall state of repair of their French originals. As we wandered around a bit before settling for a beer and a bite we were passed by a guy of 50ish talking somewhat impressively to himself in those exclamatory bursts which suggest a thrashing of insight is assailing him but felt like it was assaulting us. This is not too unusual in cities these days, and judging from some 15^th century Dutch paintings we saw in a museum on the Place a couple of days later, may have been typical of any level of close human habitation over at most times in human history.

A day later we were back for a shopping tour of the Pentagon – a wholly inappropriate modernity attached to the Place – and there he was again. At hearing/seeing him I thought: some people’s lives are to keep reappearing as a bad dream in the lives of others, invasively demanding attention they need but can’t get, yet we cannot just tell the dream to go away.

“man section”…

..it said on the right hand front side of a wooden drawer whose left front side said “pen knives”. The whole sat under a glassed in display of various products of knives used correctly. I was attracted to the weird usage with its implication of something hairy beyond the handle. Turned out to be an offering of hunting knives around the size of the one I carry in my walking backpack thanks to a long ago gift from a Chinese friend who noticed during our living in china 30 years ago that I always carried a Swiss Army knife complex enough to live off the land with if necessary.

Of course, the “man section” in question was in the local handicrafts section of the Buda Pest public market, a mid-19^th century iron and brick barn of railway station proportions, light and airiness so my expectations were roused in that blank but irresistible way that a sudden touch of hominess (the man section in this case) came into view. Foreign places produce in me a disposition to search, to find the familiar in the foreign while thinking I’m looking for the foreign.

The Antigone…a star of failed grandiosity

Finally, two last takes on the grandiosity theme. One, the Antigone in Montpellier is a roughly 70’s production leading off from the above Place and competing with it for grandeur but failing miserably, so much so that the cafes which line parts of its 1.5 kilometre of fading 5 story mixed use living and business buildings are barely making it and the infrastructure is

scruffy and needing renewal it may never get. The thing never worked and so is grandiose??

Two, in reflecting during lunch (which was quite presentable, as usual) in one of said cafes it occurred to me that this business of judging grandeur, greatness and grandiosity is very much a matter of taste, which in turn is very much a matter of those two enduring sources of human potential – gifts of birth and the inherited social standards which accompany them, often enough incongruously. Similar observations can be made about ethical as aesthetic matters.

Travel funnies 2012-13 - Grand, great and grandiose?

Torrey Orton

June 23,  2013

Grand, great and grandiose...challenges of appreciation seeking grounds for interpretation

 

Mountains are grand and great, but never grandiose. They just are and have no purpose. They cannot over or under express themselves. They can be more or less visible, but through no fault of their own. It’s their fate to just be.

 

People can be great and grand, and in the eyes of others, grandiose. I remember the first time I was accused (actually it wasn’t an accusation; it was an observation; but, I hear it even now as disapproval) of being grandiose. Well, I can understand why that observation was made without assuming myself as either great or grand in the equation. I can also understand that cultures may be and/or appear grandiose, while clearly being great and grand in various ways. Architecture is the most materially enduring expression of greatness and grandeur, and it may feel grandiose – an experience of something over-expressed out of lack of clarity or confidence, as a child does appropriately in early life achievements where a hurdle passed is experienced with joy and even ecstasy if the effort has been protracted.

 

I started writing this in July 2012 towards the end of that year’s Europe trip, late July.  Europe and its enduring cultures – Slavic, romance and Germanic, or Greco-Latin and Teutonic: the contrasts elaborate as reflection spreads across time and space. The contrast on my mind at the moment is the handling of public space in cultures,  brought to mind by spending 2 days in Besancon and amplified by realising that the historical juncture of the origins of these cultures lies where we were then, in Istanbul one morn having visited the Cisterns of the Basilica which collected the waters of a forest 10ks away in 500AD, delivered through a viaduct as were the waters of Rome to the famous baths and such 500+ years before that – the still visible beginnings of the terraforming of the world in the chasing of the waters to meet the needs of sedentary mankind, perhaps making sedentary a real possibility in numbers…

A day later and we’d spent a couple of hours in the Aya Sofya which dwarfs its neighbour the Blue Mosque both for volume and age, an impression amplified strangely by its comparative scruffiness, both in and out.

                                                         

…so, this is the basis of my great and grand wonders, and probably I haven’t gotten far enough back and should go to the first out-of-Africa migrants 50,000 years ago who went right at the nearest turn after the Red Sea. Their journeys eastwards along the ocean shores expressed among other things the mindless human devotion to looking around the next corner, not merely for something better but just wondering what’s there while able to find a consistently cheap bite of adequate substance to continue wandering. Wanderlust, perhaps, or wonderlust?

 

Besancon is home to the largest 16^th century fortifications in France (?), including a main central fort with a natural river moat on all sides built by the famous Vauban and supported by a circle of forts on four adjacent hilltops…all the more remarkable, when you think about it, for the fact that the fortifications were already superannuated by developments in cannonry…a line of development which still escaped military planners in France who built Verdun in the 19^th century and had a go again with the even more unlikely Maginot Line post WW1. The developments which outmoded them all before they were built were power and mobility, intensified with near factorial pace ever since – what’s a “hardened” site which cannot be blown by a bigger laser-guided missile?? Remember Big Bertha in WW1? And the siege mortars of the U S Civil War.? And the shift from sail to steam powered shipping and from wooden to steel…??  All bunker busters of their kinds.

 

Where has the idea of fortifications gone now?? Into legal fortifications and state boundaries, be they fluid (Australia comes to mind) or walled (Arizona and Israel come to mind). Even the Iron curtain failed in its heyday as the need to be seen to be in the world kept presenting inmates of the red world with opportunities to get out as representatives of their incarcerated perfection (Olympics from 1956 on).

 

So what? Well, all of the built history of great, grand and grandiose is a history…an attempt to preserve an original insight (include religions here, pls.) …and the effort to preserve sustains the image of the insight as irreplaceably great, which it had been when it replaced the previously great insight…and so on and so. But our need to believe that the newest insight is also the final one bonds us to them with an almost unbreakable strength…the kind which sends tens of thousands to their deaths in the face of machine guns…and resists its own demise with blind fervour (all those generals then; all our leaders now in the face of the failure of natural markets to ‘work’…)

 

June 2013 –and here we are in Besancon again with much more time to wander around and find it almost totally as it was 200 years ago within the barriers of its built and natural fortification, some of which go back 400 years or so and were built on the back of originally Roman ones still in view in the usual Roman forms: triumphal arches (Marcus Aurelius 175 AD) and theatres, baths and normal living stuff of similar origin. Much less fortified to exclude than dressed to attract.

 

And the place is grand, coherent, human scaled and liveable…though close to losing it all in the industrial turnaround from 1970 on (almost all of its large scale employment decimated; it had been home to the production of 1/3 of watches in France up til then!!). About 1/3 of the inner city is pedestrianized and the whole is so small (about 1.5 square kilometres) that parking outside the center is easily adequate to the mixed demands of shopping and promenading. The whole thing is four stories high, with a couple of cathedral steeples in excess of the four stories. This gives a humanly appropriate scale mix of enclosure by wall and openness to sky at once, plus the street level density of commercial and service offerings that only cities can provide at footpace.

 

Much of the building stock is grand even though hundreds of years old either because its origins were religious or public service – from schools to hospitals to local / regional governance with a broad spread of the ecclesiastical some of which was turned over to public sector use as church control was compromised by church/state separation in 1905. Building material consistency helps the impression of integrity and scale - a local stone which has elements of blue and yellow/grey in it whose original colour has been resurrected by a cleaning operation some years ago which recalled the original from the blackening of years of coal and wood fired heating, cooking and power. What it looked like before the unveiling is still on view in a couple of escapees from the great cleaning (one of which is a branch of an educational facility of some kind now defunct). Black is pretty much what it is…/

 

This is a line of report which keeps extending as we travel… a week later in Montpellier being appalled by a state sponsored excrescence called Antigone launched off the shoulder of the original Place de la Comedie with its 19^th century grandeur in tact. The 1970’s offshoot models grandiose to a T, with clear evidence of its failure to meet whatever public usage was imagined in its design and execution….lack of upkeep, etc.

 

Closing now with a visit to Nimes’s quite preserved little arena  modelled on the colossal Roman original but built for 24,000 public gore appreciators rather than the 60K its namesake supported. Grand and great but not grandiose it feels to us.

 

Travel funnies 2013 (3)
Torrey Orton
June 15, 2013

 

There’s always more bits… ‘You will be remembered…’


Ambling down a street in the old city part of Gap, France, a spot literally in a gap between two 2000 metre plateaus on the edge of the Parc des Ecrins to the east and the Vannoise to the west, I noticed a delivery truck pull into a two-car (two little European city cars, that is) space carved into the pathway of what was otherwise a one-way one lane road between 18^th century buildings.

 

No big deal, until I noticed that the 1.2 metre high pole next to the space had turned green at the top and a countdown had started from 15:00 on a visual display about 10 cm down the pole. So, I thought, this is what Melbourne City Council is threatening us with their ‘you will be remembered from the moment you park your car’ in the streets of Carlton, East Melbourne and so on. That is, they can tell when you arrived. However the Gap treatment was even more sophisticated because the broadcast timekeeper is visible from 200 metres away down the road to the next cross street so the touring forces of parking order can detect an overstay in a flash (and I bet the touring forces can do the entire inner city circuit of such short term stopspots in about 15 minutes guaranteeing the best rate of return for investment on two counts: more money and better access to short term parking for those needing it).

A clear social boundary drawn?

Watching the passing human parade is always interesting, especially when it is not too dense so that the manner of an individual’s or small group’s (couple, family , friends) passing can be observed clearly while also un-intrusively. Again in Gap, France, we were having our street café lunch (great fresh salads by the way) before entraining for Besancon via Grenoble and Lyon. I noticed a single woman encountering two other women, one of whom she knew well (broad smile and gestures from a reasonable distance before their paths actually crossed). The acquainted two did the three kisses greeting characteristic of French signs of greater (and, implicitly, lesser) expressions of intimacy. The accompanying, unacquainted, one was excluded, de facto, from the greater intimacy of three kisses and the lesser intimacy of two or even one. She got none, and when, almost as an afterthought, was introduced to the solo woman neither offered a hand nor was offered one in hello.

 

They were too far away for me to see if there was any non-verbal expression of rejection which constituted the determination of intimacy distance as total, apart from the fact that they were facing each other. And an implicit rejection was recognised by neither offering any acknowledgment of the traditional types to each other.

We do not have a word in English for someone whose role is to be excluded without being acknowledged by the players or observers in a specific social event at this level of simplicity and brevity. I don’t know whether French does or not. The fact was quite visible but difficult to describe because a number of relationship factors have to be captured without the relationship indictors to place all the actors.

 

I realised after writing this that I was attuned to such matters by the hostess of our Mercantour stay who insisted on two kisses on both meeting us for the first time and on our departure. For me this was inappropriate for two reasons. One, she isn’t French, and two I’m not inclined to kiss anyone I do not know, male or female, French or other, on first hellos anyway.  Probably something about the remaining edges of my Anglo upbringing where no one kissed anyone, in public anyway …?

 

Hotel de Police

Later the same day we were on the train again towards the north from Grenoble and closing on Lyon for a transfer to the TGV for the last step of our day’s travel. I like to keep loose count of the inactive business facilities visible from passing through the rail yards of cities. The industrial histories of the last couple hundred years are often to be read in their architectures and utilisation rates. One kind of utilisation is incarceration, often signalled by multiple levels and styles of razor wiring of the tops of walls, confirmed by lighting towers and guard posts in case the real use seems open to interpretation. Other semi-secure facilities make a pretence of looking like this but there’s always gaps in their razor wires.

I noted the real use before I read the title over the somewhat elaborate gate: “Hotel de Police” in large lettering. This confirmation was a bit much for my linguistic capacities again. I went for the implicit joke until Jane reminded me that ‘hotel’ in French has a seriously more diversified history than our adapted version of the same term, as in Hotel de Ville for a major local government establishment – certainly not an English usage but very French. Have a look at the Hotel de Ville in Paris for a reminder.

Still, the Lyon prison Hotel de Police! It looked in quite functioning shape, and had been for a century or so.

 

 

 

Appreciation (49) – Hitting the mark

Torrey Orton

June 14, 2013

It came to me as a I was thinking about some therapeutic matter that being a baseball pitcher ((which I was all thru primary and secondary until year 12 when I realised I wasn’t going anywhere with it and gave it up (with absolutely no sense of loss that I can recall, which is about the best indicator of a timely life change I know) for a new sport – lacrosse – which shared a number of things with ice hockey which I didn’t give up until over age thirty some 40 years ago)) is a bit like doing one on one therapy.

This is a long stretch. But I’ll try to follow the lead of the image. The aim of pitching is to get three balls past the batter and inside a visually defined space with each pitch. That space is characterised by the absence of 3D material definition and so what pitch is in or out of the space is largely a matter of judgement. The pitcher’s efforts are assisted by the catcher, who signals kinds of pitches which might be successful against a specific batter and holds a large glove, not visible to the batter, roughly where he wants the ball pitched to. That’s why there is an umpire standing almost on top of the catcher. An unkind but appropriate description of which is that they look like a spooning couple or a pair of beetles in rut. I’m just following what comes from pursuit of the image here!

Anyway, the objective of pitching is to get the batters out either by throwing ‘strikes’ (in the aiming zone above) or inducing them to hit the ball to one of the fielders. The batter can swing at pitches whether in the zone or not.  A well hit ball can be struck within or outside the strike zone. Now as a therapist I am sometimes pitching ideas, impressions, feelings to patients who are looking for a good pitch from their point of view. That is, they may have in mind what I should be throwing at them and not be able to recognise the good balls in the strike zone I offer up. They may go for second rate material outside the zone (not all of my offers are good; that is, they are uncontrolled to some extent). A good pitcher can put the ball pretty close to where the catcher signals for it all the time.

Like a pitcher I want to get patients out of there to some extent. And the batter wants to get out of there in a different sense: that is, by hitting safely. A patient might be wanting to get a better grip on themselves and look for insight from me to assist. I have no catcher directing me and there’s no umpire to keep the rules for us both. So, a patient may go for a weaker pitch of mine which I wouldn’t have thrown if I had a catcher and an umpire and took more breaks between the action. And then again, it may be that my weaker pitch was also one the patient could handle at that moment; my better pitch might have been untouchably better. In baseball a weak pitch may also be a sucker ball – something that looks close enough to good (inside the strike zone) to demand a batter’s attention. A good sucker ball may just be a slight mis-pitch as may a slightly misdirected comment – an out, a hit or a homerun, but for the patient and me, neither of us may know at the time.

Finally, following this image has reinforced my sense that sports imagery is suggestive but seldom directive.

  

Travel funnies 2013 (2)

Torrey Orton

June 13, 2013

Rocks do fall – Squeezed, again!!

It is a source of endless entertainment to notice the various ways our route-masters attempt to preserve themselves from litigation in the name of preserving us from our emerging fates en route to whereva we’re going. Take “rocks may fall” for example, a geological salutation common to slightly hilly areas of our neck of the Australian woods running a tight race with its biological brethren “limbs may fall” and “overhanging limbs” for leadership in the fatalities by fate struggle. But I meander…

Along the switchbacks of the Mercantour there are no signs proclaiming imminent disaster by stone, though at the head of three valleys we passed up are signs looking dead ringers for Oz beach warnings to foreigners about the dangers of high surf symbolised by a stick figure swimmer about to be swamped or mouthed by a looming dumper. And sure enough, that’s what’s being warned in these three valleys only the prospect of seeing such a fate has to be a lot smaller than the Australian version. The sign warns us that local electricity supply authorities may decide to evacuate the local dam without warning. At one such spot, there was even one little permanent statuette of a religious type cemented to the bordering rock just above normal stream flow levels (with permanent plastic flowers attached) memorialising one loser to the watery maw. Death by car mementos abound on Australian roads and a couple of mountain ones we’ve recently travelled here. No implications here for the relative death prospects of the two settings.  It seems the overall road toll in France is similar to Oz. Still, I meander…

Much more reliable in the Mercantour is the appearance of a recently fallen rock in the high roads of the region. They seem to fall cleanly into the middle of the quite constricted driving lanes, often enough just around one of the blind curves provided by walls of rock rising beyond sight (mountains) along the path. Some of the fallen rocks look a lot like they’ve been intentionally placed by hand, being often quite well shaped and cubic and just big enough to shock a steering system into irrecoverable disarray. Scared me, too. Hence my feeling squeezed by the prospect of encountering a fallen rock.

Of course that’s a paranoid foreign fantasy, but I’m not meandering here. That’s how they look. Someone must have put them there, they are so neat and neatly poised so often.

Lacets.

We got to know these well in their command of mountain driving.  A lacet is a switchback or hairpin turn. After days of responding to warnings of their imminence, often in multiples specified on warning signs – e.g. 3 lacets or 4 lacets – one of us wondered at the obvious: lacets = laces?? No??  Yes! And laces on shoes or corsets are switchbacks aren’t they. Once again a true linguistic friend not recognised, because it didn’t need to be. A lacet is so obviously a switchback it needn’t be thought!!

Heinz Dijon mustard?? Really…

Over the last two weeks I’ve increasingly thought there’s been an Americanisation of French (and other European??) public cuisine in two respects. One, the emergence of American marques in the retail food sector, of which Heinz Dijon mustard in single serve plastic sachets (think any American burger bar of pre-Mac days).Did the source the Dijon marque from Dijon? I guess not cuz the sachets don’t even say where the product they contain is sourced, despite the marque!!! Of course, these were very local eateries not salons of grand cuisine. Keep posted. We’re getting near to that next week and I suspect we won’t see Heinz there.

The second respect: shopping in Casino or Carrefour here is increasingly like Coles or Woollies in Oz, where the great maestros of food marketing are endlessly seeking ways to constrain us to less choice – that’s what house brands are about. Smart FMCG folks will tell me that the Oz retail maestros actually are learning from the French. Noticeably for us the varieties of muesli which not long ago adorned the shelves of these two providers have all but disappeared, relegate to “Bio” shelves. We’ve been in metropolitan and country France pretty much every year over the last 8 or so, preceded by multiple times going back to the early70’s.

Travel funnies 2013

Torrey Orton

June 9, 2013

Travel funnies – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, unexpected…in short, a threat to my normal preconceptions, understandings and values. The shock of the new is often a laugh of surprise, which isn’t what people are talking about when thy say they are just having a laugh. Now, here we go again…overseas that is, to France quite a lot, with a closing glance at Budapest, if it doesn’t get rained out, which it currently is on the flooding reports for this week.

“… verbalisation par camera..”

Having barely escaped the car rental company parking lot (learning to drive again – see below!) and started to navigate our way out of Nice we came to a series of traffic lights working more or less successfully to keep French drivers and foreign pretenders in line. Our attention was on the third ahead at which we needed to turn left. In the near distance an illuminated panel about 1 meter square next to the traffic lights blinked with neon intensity  –“ …verbalisation par camera…” I love the little wonders of our twinned languages and here was one. I haven’t checked yet whether “verbalisation” here means what being verballed means in Oz, but I’m guessing yes. That is, you can’t argue with this camera. Its sight is its word and the word is good…and you’re fined!!

 

Is this a case of French being eroded by English (a borrowing unauthorised by the Academie Francaise), by English usage (a real friend which turns out to have a bad family background) or just some unnoteworthy linguistic coincidence? Notice I haven’t considered that we borrowed the usage from French…. Ah, linguistic hegemony.

 

For the third trip in a row we are starting with a week in a rented car. The first two trips were outstanding successes, though the second of the two, a Skoda station wagon from their premier range, provided, on reflection, a forewarning of the vicissitudes late modernity has for me. It was a start by touch not by key machine.  Like many IT-innovated products the main usage processes were somewhat counter-intuitive. The rental company had no reasons to assume there was anything to warn me about. I’d obviously been driving a long time in a lot of places. While there was an on-board instruction module with screen (not touch screen and don’t wait for it) and all, I still thought driving a car was to be done by driving the car, not driving secondary screen-based systems enabling driving the car. Which brings me to now…

We have a Citroen D5 diesel 6 speed manual, four door plus hatch semi-RV with danger sensors all around and a rear looking reversing management system providing live video to aforesaid screen.  Whoever designed the thing clearly never drove on mountain roads like those of the Parc Mercantour in the French Alpes Maritimes just across the hill from eastern Italy. They are almost without exception, if we are off the local inter-village routes in the valleys, a constant opportunity for life threatening encounters either with other drivers who zing around as if we’re on an autoroute  and/or with falling off the side of a mountain with 200-300 shear metres drop available just to the right or left. Much of this opportunity occurs with switchbacks as mentioned.  And much of the opportunity is on roads which really fit about 1 and ½ cars with a mocking dividing line signalling passing allowed down the middle!!

 

The Bren gun carrier school of design

 

Now here’s the design glitch. The D5 is out of the Bren gun carrier school of vehicle configuration – squat and heavy – with the added complication of a pretence to tank-lite slits for windows, aggravated by the blockages to all around vision which occur when these characteristics are joined in one vehicle.  The roof beaming is also squashed, especially in the driver’s line of sight around the squeezed sharp turns of switchbacks. The turns can’t be seen around. Fortunately we have a flexible driver assist system in the passenger’s seat who can see around, sometimes. Meanwhile I’m trying to gauge the sharpness of the turn and the turn space the road builders happened to manage on this particular switchback (highly variable!) while changing down to first gear and not end up under a cement truck which has appeared from the next switchback driven at local driver’s speed, a competence for which I have yet to receive my probationer’s license…but then, that’s a self-administered qualification. How will I know I’m deserving? By not succumbing??

 

The origin of this gun carriage design I think is the Chrysler 300C of about ten years ago when scrunching the roof down on the body got its first life, with a net reduction in visibility for drivers and observability for others. Maybe the Lexus 4WD four door station wagon / RV of the late 90’s was an unintended contributor with its scrunched down rear section detracting from a clear view though providing a notionally aesthetic marketing edge at the time.

Over the last 5 years the feature has spread across the motoring marques from the Subaru XV last year back thru the BMW and Range Rover, with less pronounced versions all around suggesting aggressive cool for your driving buck. It seems to be an offshoot of the muscle machines which have increased in availability in direct proportion to the unreliability of everyday life. In our Citroen version the crunching of vision is such that it is almost impossible for the driver to get any rear view except through the rear vision screen!! And the slight bit available is squeezed by reduced rear window size and shape and oversized anti-whiplash headrests.

A stray left arm, or the return of the phantom limb

 

I’m always learning, sometimes by force of choice, as with unlearning my automatic driving responses to make the shift from right to left hand drive. I’ve on the whole done better this time than earlier when I had nearly irrepressible tendencies to turn into the left hand lane given any chance to do so. Not that unlearning here. Now it’s the one about shifting gears right-handed.

 

When a gear shifting need comes to mind, even after four days driving here and dozens of the switchback turns that dominate the mountain landscape demands to shift up or down to make the needed turns without having to stop hallway through and back up to gain the curve, my left hand starts lightly waving towards the non-existent shift lever in the direction of the car door close on my left. This happens before I am aware of the need thought which drives it. And the countermanding order arrives almost in tune with the phantom limb’s gesture at controlling the car, but consciously telling my right hand to reach for the shift lever which is, correctly for a left hand drive car, to my right!

 

I haven’t driven a manual car for 7 years, except that first drive in France three years ago. Not an excuse. Rather, perspective on the embedded habits I am dealing with. Plus, while I’m at it, here’s an acknowledgement of relevant prior experience in these matters. I grew up in a right hand drive world and spent my first 14 years as a driver driving in it.

 

The feeling of being here - Squeezed

“Squeezed” was the word that came to mind reflecting on the events and scenes above. Driving is an endless squeeze to pass by any other vehicle, to resist the temptation to speed up to local rates and to stay on the roads when the vertiginous attraction of the deeps just off them are at their strongest.

 

 The countryside is actually squeezing in a way different from the other alpine areas we’ve visited in the last 10 years. Though only averaging around 3000 metres at the highest, the Alpes Maritime of the Mercantour are a dense impression sustained by the depth and narrowness of the array of valleys between them. Another take on the feeling of being here is embraced… on an easily accessible walk yesterday we got closer to the highest peaks than we ever did in the Pyrenees or other French Alpes and so giving the experience of being surrounded by them. I took a video sweep of them which covered about 270 degrees.

 

Learning to act right (34)… “Gloves are off”

Torrey Orton
June 1, 2013

 

“Gloves are off” usually signals engaging with more force, preparing for a fight of some kind, having it out. There’s another usage, at least in my life, which is perhaps equally automatic as this one, but does not enjoy its linguistic popularity. This ungloved hand is a foundation of right action.

 Right action is founded in civility in part, and civility in politenesses, and politenesses in human history, perhaps some even back to our pre-historic precursors. Among these, manners of greeting are central and mostly pass by without notice because they are automatic at the beginning and ending of events. The arrival of Melbourne’s version of winter (8C early mornings) is glove country for me. I show up around 7am at my twice weekly morning post in front of the Fertility Control Clinic to be greeted eventually by the security guard of the day. On his walking down the Clinic path I unglove my right hand with my left and offer the bare paw to him.

 

Originally, on the first such morning, he declared my ungloving unnecessary. I had to explain that it just is not right to shake a man’s hand (or any other’s, child or adult for that matter!) with a glove on. I couldn’t explain why. He had not grown up in a winter gloved  place, so it was a wonder to him, and no one on the street who I’ve chased it up with has had an idea either why it is the right thing to do.

 

My point here is not really the historical origins of my sense but rather that I have it automatically functioning, as it always has. It belongs with a number of other politenesses (public ones, especially) which arise out of me under appropriate circumstances. The most recent was standing back for others to enter a lift first. Given that I’m usually undeniably the oldest person standing wherever it is, there’s some natural deference I elicit in my efforts to honour others. A small tussle sometimes ensues of the variety specific to efforts at mutual respect which can only be resolved by one deferring to the other’s need by accepting their respect. I usually stand on my right to be respectful over theirs, but will accede to a repeatedly pled need.

 

Such habits can be changed, with serious, persistent application. For instance, I can deliver a good Chinese handshake now after a few years practice. This is seriously counter-intuitive to westerners, particularly Anglo ones, who treat any close contact between men (other than jocks in the full spiritual frenzy of sport) as suggesting sexual intent. For Chinese, length of handshake and intensity, nicely balanced and certainly not paw crushing, is a signal of presence and likely eventual persistence. Good starting places for any connection.

 

There are some other own cultural fine points: right hand only and shaking all the present hands being preferred, even if they are the paws of knowable unknowns – friends of friends; colleagues of colleague. I walked into a psych workshop a week ago and was greeted by the sponsor’s president who I’ve known professionally but distantly for 10 years. I had a coat, a backpack and the day’s course ware in my right arm/hand and offered my left to him as I moved by to let others in.  A few hours later at the midmorning break I stopped by at his table first to re-offer the shake right handed. I just had to on the way to asking a question about other matters.

 

A neuroscience influenced thinker might point out that these are behaviours intended to “down regulate” the amygdala’s wariness about anything new. I’m not sure this adds too much other than to  the accessibility of the concept of the amygdala’s function. I don’t doubt it is true, nor that an appearance of civil intent can be presented which is also keeping under cover some degree of apprehension about the other.

 

A few weeks earlier I had stopped into a local restaurant in Albert Park to pass on a long-delayed message from an industry old-timer I had seen months earlier in another place. The boss was in, as were his main 2ICs. I held out my hand to the boss and reported the message with appropriate disclaimers for my lateness in doing so. I was in a rush for some reason and went out immediately only to be stopped in my tracks 100 meters away by noticing that I had insulted the 2ICs. It’s a nice question what prompted the awareness but the proximate trigger was a video replay of the just gone event in which I notice the missing handshakes for the 2ICs!!!

 

The explanation, I imagine, is a subliminal function which checks experience against templates for right action. I turned around in the middle of my stopped tracks, retraced my steps, asked the boss to get the 2ICs back (one of whom was in the upstairs storage area of the restaurant), shook their hands and explained my need to do so, which they persistently assured me was not required nor even noticed by them. The latter point I wondered about but couldn’t stop to explore. It could have been impolite to do so – disrespectful of their explicit self-knowledges of not needing my paw then!!

 

I wonder if these behaviours can be picked up in an fMRI “light up”, or any other of its kind.